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Former Electric-car Engineer: Electric Cars Pollute More Than Gas The New American 12 July 2013 Is the only "green" aspect of electric cars the money some companies make off them? If former plug-in advocate and General Motors engineer Ozzie Zehner (shown) is correct, this is exactly the case. Author of the book Green Illusions, Zehner once built his own hybrid car that could run on electricity or natural gas. And, he writes in a recent article entitled "Unclean at Any Speed," he was convinced cars such as his "would help reduce both pollution and fossil-fuel dependence." But he now...

BERKELEY, Calif., July 1 (UPI) — Electric cars, despite their supposed green credentials, are among the environmentally dirtiest transportation options, a U.S. researcher suggests. Writing in the journal IEEE Spectrum, researcher Ozzie Zehner says electric cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than gasoline cars and other transportation options. Electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one place to another, he wrote, and "most electric-car assessments analyze only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle's entire life...

Conservatives have long argued that the pursuit of electric vehicles through government grants and credits is a bad idea, mainly from a public-policy and economic standpoint. But what if electric vehicles are a bad idea from an environmental standpoint, too? An environmental activist who once pushed for EVs and now works as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley now calls electric vehicles “unclean at any speed” in a recent article for the engineering journal IEEE Spectrum (via Weasel Zippers and UPI): The idea of electrifying automobiles to get around their environmental shortcomings isn’t new. Twenty years ago, I myself built...

New Book: Solar Cells 23,000 Times Worse for Environment Than Carbon Dioxide Tuesday, June 05, 2012 – by Staff Report Solar Cells Linked to Greenhouse Gases Over 23,000 Times Worse than According to New Book, Green Illusions ... Solar cells do not offset greenhouse gases or curb fossil fuel use in the United States according to a new environmental book, Green Illusions (June 2012, University of Nebraska Press), written by University of California - Berkeley visiting scholar Ozzie Zehner. Green Illusions explains how the solar industry has grown to become one of the leading emitters of hexafluoroethane (C2F6), nitrogen...

The abrupt resignation this week of William Lynch, the 43-year-old Barnes & Noble chief executive, was only the latest in a catalogue of troubles at one of the US's biggest book chains. If this were a business whodunnit, nobody could fail to spot the culprit: Amazon. Still, with bookshops everywhere in retreat as the internet takes an ever greater slice of their trade, it seemed to many that a chain with its own dedicated e-reader – the Nook – could have the answer. But with Barnes & Noble's device struggling to make any headway against Amazon's Kindle, that strategy, and...

Edward Kritzler’s history of Jewish pirates is uneven By Adam Kirsch NEW YORK (NEXTBOOK) -- There are places you expect to find Jews and places you don't, and in the second category, the deck of a pirate ship ranks pretty close to the top. The very title of "Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean" sounds like the premise of a science-fiction novel -- maybe a sequel to Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," in which Yiddish-speaking Jews colonize Alaska -- or else the punchline to a joke. But Edward Kritzler's new book, despite its serious flaws of scholarship and interpretation, has...

Looks like a realatively high volume of page requests is overwhelming FR yet again. Perhaps it's past time to call in some FR code jockeys to get this straightened out?

July 3 marks the last day of the battle of Gettysburg 150 years ago -- Pickett's Charge, the "high water mark of the Confederacy." July 4 is of course Independence Day, but this year it is also the sesquicentennial of the surrender of Vicksburg, which split the rebel states in two by securing the length of the Mississippi for the Union. This week, a century and a half ago, marked the certain beginning of the end for the Confederacy and thus of slavery and the rise of the great Republic of freedom. To commemorate this week, I am spending the...

In the summer of 2010, with Republicans poised to take over the House and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in line to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the White House started urging reporters to write negative stories about the congressman’s past, a new book says. (article continues at link)

…are the only possible response to this White House memo extolling the virtues of Obama consiglieri Valerie Jarrett. The memo contains talking points to be used by White House staffers who were instructed to praise Jarrett in advance of a New York Times profile that appeared in September 2012. It was leaked to Mark Leibovich and will appear in his forthcoming book, This Town. The memo is hilariously titled “The Magic of Valerie.”The magic of Valerie is her intellect and her heart. She is an incredibly kind, caring and thoughtful person with a unique ability to pinpoint the voiceless and...

A soon-to-be-released book by Mark Leibovich reveals in excruciating detail the White House’s efforts to defend longtime Obama friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett in the run-up to a New York Times profile that ran in September 2012. Leibovich, himself a reporter for the New York Times, got ahold of a White House memo titled “The Magic of Valerie” that included 33 talking points circulated throughout the administration. Here are the talking points excerpted in Leibovich’s forthcoming book, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America’s Gilded Capital: The magic of Valerie is her intellect and her...

Link only http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/wp/2013/07/03/this-town-who-comes-off-worse-in-mark-leibovichs-takedown-of-insider-washington/?hpid=z4

In the summer of 2010, with Republicans poised to take over the House and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in line to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the White House started urging reporters to write negative stories about the congressman’s past, a new book says. New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich describes what he says were the anti-Issa efforts in “This Town,” a condemnation of Washington self-obsession and self-promotion, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Post. According to Leibovich, former Obama deputy press secretary Bill Burton and suggested the reporter look into Issa’s past....

Sam Webb, Chair of the Communist Party USA wants to give the GOP a “Licking” in 2014 and its going to work even more closely with the Democrats to do it. In his latest message to the Party faithful: “Ingredients for a movement that can transform our country,” Webb outlined Communist Party objectives for the near future. Speaking of the broad “progressive” alliance with the Communist Party at its center Webb said: Contrary to what some on the left think, the starting point of transformative politics isn’t political desires and wish list, but a sober and concrete assessment of the...

Critics have called Margalit Fox's new book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, a paleographic detective procedural. It follows the story of the laborious quest to crack a mysterious script, unearthed in Crete in 1900, known by the sterile-sounding name Linear B. Fox, an obituary writer for The New York Times, is good at bringing the departed to life. In The Riddle of the Labyrinth, she tells the story of Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College, who worked alone over decades and discovered the essential grammar of Linear B, only to die in 1950 before she could complete her...

Weighing the economics of Abraham Lincoln isn’t easy to do in today’s terms. Lincoln was pro-subsidy and pro-tariff, both of which stances tend to be assigned to the interventionist left in today’s discussions. But Lincoln’s infrastructurally and financially primitive economy was not ours, and it’s worth thinking about how he might govern today given that in his words there is an unshakeable faith in free enterprise. Lincoln was pro-business, laudatory of wealth creation (and the inequality that goes with it), against class warfare and in favor of exploiting natural resources. “Property,” he said in 1864, “is the fruit of labor...

Dr. Paul Kengor: Dinesh, your last book was What’s So Great About Christianity, which did quite well, and which we profiled in a series of Q&As last year ( Part I , Part II , Part III ). It led to, among other things, an ongoing fascinating series of public debates you’ve had with Christopher Hitchens. It appears that your latest book, "Life After Death: The Evidence," came from those experiences. Tell us what prompted this book-which, for the record, I recommend as a Christmas gift for both believers and (especially) non-believers.Dinesh D’Souza: Intellectually, yes, I was provoked by the...

Film to reveal heroine as a spy who helped JapanBy Jack Webster   American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, did not die at sea in 1937. Rather, she became a Japanese collaborator after being caught spying for the US during second world war. This and other amazing revelations are to be the basis of a Hollywood film that aims to uncover the strange truth behind her mysterious disappearance. Earhart was already an American heroine when, at midnight on July 2, 1937, she and navigator Fred Noonan took off from New...

“A confidential message from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, reproduced in [Diana] West’s new book, told [White House aide Harry] Hopkins that a ‘continuing’ investigation had discovered that Russian diplomat (and Comintern agent) Vasily Zarubin had made a payment to U.S. Communist Party official Steve Nelson to help place espionage agents ‘in industries engaged in secret war production … so that information could be obtained for transmittal to the Soviet Union.’ This information had come from a ‘bug’ at Nelson’s home in Oakland, California, through which the FBI first learned of the Soviet effort (code-named ‘Enormous’) to obtain the atomic...

A book called "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character" (St. Martin's Press) shouldn't promise uplift and spiritual renewal. I know. I wrote it. That said, the story of "betrayal" that my new book lays out -- betrayal enabled by a de facto Communist occupation of Washington by American traitors loyal to Stalin, which would solidify in the 1930s under FDR and be covered up by successive U.S. administrations and elites -- is not without inspiration. I am talking about the inspiration of the truth-tellers. "American Betrayal" presents a rewrite of most of World War II and Cold...